Air Comfort Corporation Installs New Air Conditioning System in Historic Civic Opera Building

Tenants at the Civic Opera Building are breathing easier because of a new environmentally-friendly air conditioning system installed by Air Comfort Corporation. And the installation was completed with a minimum of disturbance to the occupants of the building, which spans an entire block of Wacker Drive, between Madison and Washington streets in downtown Chicago.

The first of two new 1,200-ton Carrier chillers to cool the building was installed in 1993. Air Comfort Corporation installed the second 1,200-ton unit in late 1996. In order to facilitate the process, six concrete slabs were removed from the sidewalk on the Wacker Drive side of the building. Another six slabs were removed from the floor immediately beneath those six, and a third set from the sub-basement level below. The chiller was then lowered into the hole and transported through a passageway to the basement.

Although Wacker Drive was closed during the process, Air Comfort Corporation Vice President Tim Smerz noted that “it was done at night time and it was put back in the morning.” Consequently, building tenants weren’t inconvenienced by the process; it’s likely many were unaware that the installation had occurred overnight.

The Carrier units that Air Comfort installed utilize a refrigerant called 134A. Smerz said that this new refrigerant is “environmentally friendly and doesn’t have a chlorine base to it like the environmentally-harmful chloro-fluorocarbon (CFC) refrigerant. R-134A uses a hydro-fluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerant; it doesn’t harm the ozone layer like a CFC does.”

The new chillers also use pump-out vessels to help minimize the loss of refrigerants. The refrigerants used by the unit are pumped and recycled into vessels for storage during off-season months.

The system set up for the Civic Opera Building is environmentally friendly in other ways, too. One of the most significant is the fact that the units’ condensers utilize Chicago River water, which saves both fresh water and energy. The water is fed through the system, then returned to the river.

“It’s an extremely efficient and effective medium for cooling,” Smerz said. “Normally with chillers like that, you would need to cool down the condenser water by having a large cooling tower on the roof or just wasting water by running city water through it and into a drain. What we are able to do is take river water, which has the ideal temperature condition, and put it right through the condenser, and then right back into the river.”

Air Comfort Corporation also installed new plate and frame heat exchangers located on the 23rd floor to cool the top floors of the building. This eliminated the need for two 160-ton chillers and cooling towers previously used for cooling these areas.

Smerz added that because the water runs through a purifying medium, “it gets back to the river in better condition than the way it entered the building. It’s very energy-efficient and very effective.”

Air Comfort Corporation is also working on a program to systematically replace outdated coil cooling/heating exchangers with efficient plate exchangers to further reduce the cost of running the air conditioning system.

An additional step is being taken by the building’s staff to create a healthy working environment. All the windows in the building were replaced with double Thermopane glazed, operable aluminum windows. This will allow tenants to let fresh air in, weather permitting, a unique feature for high-rises, which are usually tightly sealed. Tenants also are able to control conditions in their offices through individual thermostats which generates additional savings.

The building’s own engineering staff, under the direction of chief engineer, Mike Kenny, will be handling the day-to-day maintenance of the two Carrier units. Air Comfort Corporation will handle repairs and do annual winter maintenance of the machines.

The air conditioning update project handled by Air Comfort Corporation is part of a three-year multi-million dollar renovation of the historic Civic Opera Building, which was designed by the architectural firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, under the direction of General Electric founder and first president Samuel Insull. The building officially opened on November 4, 1929, ten days after the stock market crash.

Current Civic Opera Building owner Steve Fifield has guided the building through significant improvements and upgrades. “The building’s ownership and management have taken a far-sighted approach to these projects, positioning the property to move into the 21st century,” said Smerz. Noel Daly was Air Comfort’s design engineer on the project.

The 45-story building is over 550 feet high and contains 20,800,000 cubic feet of space. The Carrier chillers are serving an approximately 850,000-square foot portion of the building, that is primarily dedicated to office space.